In the 2012 President's Budget Request, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is terminated. As a result, all resources, databases, tools, and applications within this web site will be removed on January 15, 2012. For more information, please refer to the NBII Program Termination page.
In June, Mary Barkworth sent a survey out to the 602 US herbaria listed in Index Herbariorum.
In it she asked for current information on, among a few other things,
the size of the collection and its progress in digitization.
The purpose of the survey is to find out how
many active herbaria there are in the US, their size, and their progress
in databasing and imaging their specimens. As of June 17, about 110
replies had been received.
Some of the contact information for these herbaria is old and some
mailings have been returned as "address unknown" or "addressee no longer
at XYZ". Dr. Barkworth and her assistant, Raquelle Sanchez, will be
calling the non-responding institutions to determine whether the
herbarium still exists and who the best contact person is. Some herbaria
have been dispersed, closed, or become inactive. All the more reason
for making those that are active freely available.
Please contact Mary Barkworth at mary@biology.usu.edu or 435-797-1584 during business hours if you would like to report for your herbarium.
Vegetation Characterization Products Now Available
The goal of the
Vegetation Characterization Programis to
classify and map the vegetation communities of National Parks that have a natural resource component.
Complete documentation is currently available for sixty-seven park units and two U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge units. The VCP is managed by the USGS Center for Biological Informatics in cooperation with the NPS Inventory and Monitoring Program. The USGS Vegetation Characterization effort includes the management and upkeep of the VCP protocols, Web-based access to the standards, and the Web-based access to NPS Vegetation Characterization program finished products. (Theresa Singh, Houston, TX, 936-271-5324)
... for De Soto National Memorial:
USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program (VCP) documentation for De Soto National Memorial has been completed and is available on the VCP Web site.
Products include
aerial photography - graphic of orthophoto mosaic, and spatial orthophoto data; project report - photointerpretation key, vegetation descriptions, vegetation key, photos of map class, and accuracy assessment; field data - graphic of field plots, plots field database, physical descriptive for plots; geospatial vegetation information - graphics of vegetation communities, geodatabase, and plot photos; metadata, and a link to NPS information about De Soto National Memorial.(March 2010)
... for Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument:
USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program (VCP) documentation for Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument has been completed and is available on the VCP Web site.
Products include
aerial photography - graphic of orthophoto mosaic, and spatial orthophoto data; project report - photointerpretation key, vegetation descriptions, vegetation key, photos of map class, and accuracy assessment, and classification of the plant communities report; field data - graphic of field plots, spatial field plots data, plots field database, physical descriptive for plots and species list for plots; geospatial vegetation information - graphics of vegetation communities, spatial vegetation data, spatial boundary data and plots and AA photos; accuracy assessment information - graphic of accuracy assessment points, spatial AA points data, AA field database, and contingency matrix; metadata, and a link to NPS information about Hagerman Fossil
Beds National Monument.(March 2010)
... for Petrified Forest National Park:
USGS-National Park Service (NPS) Vegetation Characterization Program (VCP) documentation for Petrified Forest National Park has been completed and is available on the VCP Web site.
Products include
aerial photography - graphic of orthophoto mosaic, and spatial orthophoto data; project report - photointerpretation key, vegetation descriptions, vegetation key, photos of map class, and accuracy assessment; field data - graphic of field plots, spatial field plots data, field database, physical descriptive for plots and species list for plots; geospatial vegetation information - graphics of vegetation communities, spatial vegetation data, spatial boundary data and plots and AA photos; accuracy assessment information - graphic of accuracy assessment points, spatial AA points data, and contingency matrix; metadata, and a link to NPS information about Petrified Forest
National Park.
(March 2010)
The NBII Program is administered by the Biological Informatics Program of the U.S. Geological Survey